Operant Conditioning
by Guardian54
Summary: Keitaro has a... problem... on his wedding night and has an embarrassing, and painful, confession for Naru's ears.


A/N: Just got into this fandom, here I express my opinion of Naru.

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Title: Operant Conditioning

"Why isn't it working?" Naru Narusegawa was less than pleased at her newlywed husband.

Keitaro on the other hand was busy shoving tissues up his nose to stem his nosebleed "I'm not sure."

"You're obviously not low on blood, given the amount coming out of your nose. I'm glad Kitsune saw fit to give me this then… take one." Naru popped a pill out of its package. _Does he not find my body attractive? But then why would he have a nosebleed?_

"I hope this works…" Keitaro grumbled before washing the pill down. His less than clothed wife was going to be REALLY upset if his, uh, tool remained as limp and non-functional as it had since… he couldn't even remember, but it was probably sometime between the third to fifth time he'd been beaten back at Hinata House for "perversion". He cared about Naru too much to let her loose on the world so that she could be jailed for murder due to getting too angry at any mortal man. Unfortunately ever since the first couple times she hit him his brain had simply quit on him and stopped seeing her as sexually appealing. Sure, she was pretty, and had nice curves, but it seemed Keitaro Junior had a much better sense of self-preservation than the man it was attached to.

A few minutes later… "Well what do you know, Viagra does work even on my body." He looked down in surprise that his penis wasn't completely dead yet after so much conditioning from the residents of Hinata House.

"That's gr…" Naru said, trailing off as she noticed him turning his head to look at her nude form and Keitaro Junior immediately deciding that playing dead was a better strategy if he wanted to remain intact for the next minute or so "…eat." _He DOES find me hideous…_ Tears welled up in her eyes as Keitaro tried to remove the tissues from his nose, only to find that his nosebleed had resumed to vent off the fluid pressure that should otherwise have gone to certain other hydraulic bodily functions.

"Guess it doesn't work for me after all." He shrugged, looking down and away from Naru briefly only to see that Keitaro Junior was immediately trying to make a comeback… then he looked up at his beautiful wife again and Keitaro Junior went right back to playing dead. _What the hell is this?_ His mind railed against the reality. But first, he needed to take care of his wife. "Naru, it's clearly something wrong on my end, please, don't cry."

Naru was less optimistic "So this is why Mutsumi advised so strongly against waiting until marriage to make this attempt to get over my problem with men. She kept talking about bodily compatibility."

He hugged her close and pulled the sheets over their bodies, saying "Naru, I find you very attractive, but for some stupid reason this thing down here seems convinced that you'd tear it off or something the moment you see it, so I keep on having to bleed through my nose for its sake. We'll find a way to get around this problem."

"Why didn't you tell me you had an impotence problem?"

"Because I wasn't interested in reaching orbit and am not nearly as dumb as Motoko and the others think I am?" He realized he was being too snappish "Sorry… I simply shrugged it off as being due to too many nosebleeds not leaving me enough blood pressure safety margin for it to work. The last time it actually worked was I think less than a week after I moved into Hinata House. After that Keitaro Junior decided he'd prefer to stay alive, even if unused. If you beat a dog enough it will stop coming back after all, and since everyone thought I was a pervert…" He shrugged.

There was a long silence "…Keitaro, why did you date me, and why did you marry me, if I was so bad to you that I 'trained' you into impotence?"

"It's not like you managed to damage me in any other way, and I cared about you too much, so if you agreed to date me even though you kept declaring that you hated me every time you beat me up, well, at least we had a hope of staying friends for twenty, thirty, maybe more years. This way, I wouldn't be kept awake at night knowing I either sent some other man to a violent death and you to prison or sentenced you to suffering a man almost forcing himself on you regularly for much of your life, not wanting to actually kill anybody."

Naru's voice dropped even lower in volume at that "You mean you didn't marry me out of love?"

"What is love anyway? I care about you, Naru, I almost have an obsessive need to make you happy, make sure you are satisfied, I believe that's what love feels like. According to the Internet love has three phases, lust, romantic and attachment. On my side I got Naru Punched over the first two quickly enough I'm not even sure what they should be like anymore. True love… that's hanging out with someone day after day for thirty, forty, fifty years and still being friends at the end. I think we can do it." Keitaro was no sadist, but he knew he had to lay his hand out clearly now that Keitaro Junior had refused to even try to cooperate, the damned cowardly appendage that it was. He didn't want to say it so straight, but it would in his opinion be even crueler otherwise, to have his love think herself unattractive… at least this was something that she could, hopefully, to both their eventual joy, work toward fixing.

"I think we could do it too, but I read that sexless marriages are generally failing ones…"

"I can pleasure you without using Keitaro Junior, you don't need to pay me back in any way except feeling good without putting me through a wall." His hands didn't so much as twitch from the back of her shoulder blades due to the 'discipline' she'd put him through. He wondered momentarily if his hands would be more cooperative than his penis, then banished that thought since at least his hands and mouth would be under conscious control.

"But I don't want that… I don't want this to be a one-way street."

A dark part of Keitaro's mind muttered something about how any show of physical attraction before was an instant one-way-street upward, before he suppressed it forcibly and shrugged outwardly "Then I guess we'll have to work this out more slowly over time until Keitaro Junior stops being too terrified to even twitch." Apparently he'd really stuck his foot in it, because Naru cried herself to sleep clinging to him like a limpet after that, despite all efforts of his to persuade her that it was something wrong with his body, instead of it being, as she claimed, "all her fault". After all, if he was a girl, a man who wasn't her boyfriend walking in on her in the hot springs would probably also get a free flight.

It felt good to get that boulder of shame that was his acquired impotence off his chest. However, he was utterly baffled that Naru actually would seek sex at any point in any relationship given her past behaviour. It was why he hadn't told her, hoping that the problem would either go away on its own once he was given the green light, or she wouldn't be interested. The latter had seemed to be more than likely looking back on their relationship, but, well, he had miscalculated, and since Keitaro Jr. had refused to step up, had had to confess everything.

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A/N: You can probably tell I HATE violent assholes, male or female.

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